Today's links

• Thwarted: Behold the awesome destructive power of a fully operational billionaire.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Anthrax v National Inquirer; Grey goo v Second Life; Predictive policing v actual crime; Spooky cookies; California v algorithmic price-fixing; Tivo self-destructs; Disney exec endorses piracy; TSA v geologists; Handheld printer; Mandatory DRM for all Canadian music sales; Iceweasel; "Snuff"; "Shade the Changing Girl"; Latam surveillance; Scotland Yard brands encryption terrorism; RBS slaughtered 10k small businesses to seize and sell their assets; Dead Letters.
• Upcoming appearances: Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Thwarted (permalink)

There are many ways in which every billionaire is a policy failure, but the most corrosive and destructive way in which billionaires are policy failures is this: billionaires, despite being unelected and unaccountable, possess the power to control – and ruin – millions of peoples' lives.

Despite what the Prosperity Gospel and the Efficient Market Hypothesis would have you believe, having billions of dollars is in no way a reliable predictor that you also possess the wisdom to unilaterally dictate how thousands or millions of other people must live their lives, and that dictatorial power is the most tangible effect of being a billionaire.

Billionaireism is many things, but above all else, it is the power to do whatever you want to do, at the expense of whatever other people want to do. To be a billionaire is to live a life unthwarted, above the power of your workers, your neighbors, or your government and its laws. It is the right to get high on your own supply. It is the right to live a life in which no one ever calls you on your bullshit.

Billionaires aspire to live a one-sided libertarian fantasy in which they have the unlimited right to do whatever they want, and you have the right to do whatever they tell you to do.

There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than theirs. We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief. Billionaires, on the other hand, command resources that allow them to devote sizable effort to getting us to acknowledge that they should be able to tell us what to do.

This is why billionaires love neoclassical economics, with its doctrine of "revealed preferences," which holds that the only true way to understand someone's preferences is to ignore what they say and only pay attention to what they do. It's a belief that can only be adopted by people who suffer the self-inflicted neurological injury you get from doing an economics degree, which renders the victim incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power. To believe in "revealed preferences" is to observe someone who has sold their kidney to pay the rent and marvel at this person who has a revealed preference for only having one kidney:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

"Revealed preferences" is the economist's version of the bully who grabs your arm and starts whacking you with your own hand while shouting, "stop hitting yourself!" The ideological purpose that "revealed preferences" fills is letting billionaires live a life unthwarted. It's a life where they thwart everyone else, but still claim to be believers in "freedom."

This is what Peter Thiel meant when he wrote that "democracy is incompatible with freedom." In a democracy, the people who you exercise coercive power over are able to band together to create public institutions that act as a check on your power. For Thiel to maximize his freedom (to do things like spying on us and crushing our journalistic outlets), he must prevent all of us from voting, lest we vote to take away those cherished freedoms of his:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

We're told that as mere mortals, we must inevitably submit to "death and taxes." Billionaires have long since so corrupted our political system that they need not pay taxes:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo256019296.html

They have (practically speaking) infinite wealth, which means that they have practically infinite power, including the power to block any democratic attempt to limit their wealth (and thus their power):

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-war-against-accumulated-capital

Having vanquished taxes, the ultra-rich are now committed to defeating death as well, making themselves easy marks for the world's weirdest cult leaders and grifters, who promise them a mix of physical and digital immortality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVSnaINJ30

The fact that billionaires are such suckers, so often, is the strongest argument against billionaireism. Billionaires aren't just powerful, they're also fallible. We're all fallible, of course, but only billionaires get to impose their foolish ideas on so many other people, who have no say in the matter.

Henry Ford thought that he was so rich that he could build Brazilian worker housing whose windows faced the same direction as the worker housing he'd built in Dearborn, Michigan. He literally thought that being rich meant that he could ignore the entire concept of the Earth's axial tilt (he was wrong):

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/02/fordlandia-novelistic-history-of-henry-fords-doomed-midwestern-town-in-the-amazon-jungle/

Of course that was the least of Ford's follies. Ford also believed in a secret Jewish conspiracy to control humanity:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/

And despite the fact that Ford was so often demonstrably as thick as pigshit, no one was able to stop him from hiring soldiers to literally slaughter anyone who tried to limit his ability to tell other people how to live their lives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass

Ford is no exception. Elon Musk believes in the same racist garbage as Henry Ford…but he also believes that if you're rich enough, you can simply wish away geometry and physics:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics

More than anyone else, Musk illustrates the way that being insulated from people who can thwart you leads to absolute ruination. Every terrible idea Musk has, he gets to act on. This has all kinds of negative impacts, including the very real possibility that some day your house will be crushed by his flaming rocketry debris:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/texas-residents-are-suing-spacex-over-terrestrial-bombardment/

That's small potatoes, though: Musk's wrong ideas, combined with his billionaire's impunity, also allowed him to murder hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

Billionaireism is fractally terrible. By definition, the kind of person who will inflict the kinds of harms needed to amass billions of dollars in pursuit of total impunity is someone who will use that impunity to hurt even more people. Anyone who fails to outgrow a toddler's insistence on subordinating others to their will should not be allowed to subordinate anyone to their will.

Billionaire dilettantes aren't like regular dilettantes. Anyone can be a crank, but billionaire cranks have the force-multiplier of money and the impunity it brings. These allow a billionaire to turn his crackpot ideas into an unstoppable force that crushes public education:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/#witness-the-firepower-of-this-fully-armed-and-operational-battle-station

It also lets billionaires (including the billionaire ruining public education) kidnap and rape more than a thousand girls on a private island:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-bill-gates-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein-as-he-is-interviewed-in-house-probe

Whatever crank whim a rich person has, we all have to live with. Take Barre Seid: the 94 year old billionaire made his fortune manufacturing electronics, and then donated $1.6b to fund "attack philanthropy" in order to undermine belief in climate change and prevent any action from being taken to avert it:

https://www.propublica.org/article/barre-seid-heartland-institute-hillsdale-college-gmu

Seid is one of the main reasons we're experiencing the super El Nino. He's not just in the top 0.1% of wealth-horders, he's also in the top 0.1% of people we can blame for the twelve foot sea-level rise that is currently wiping Long Beach off the map:

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/long-beach-boardwalk-collapse-rachel-surf/

Henry Ford didn't believe in the planet's axial tilt. Elon Musk doesn't believe in geometry.

Barre Seid doesn't believe in climate change. But Barre Seid does believe something: Barre Seid believes in rats.

For three years, Seid has paid a small army of goons to wander the area around Chicago's Lincoln Park, scattering handfuls of high-grade nuts on the ground, which have drawn flocks of pigeons and swarms of rats. Rats are everywhere. Everything is covered in pigeon shit. Seid has been repeatedly fined and cited and warned, and he's carried on turning the neighborhood into an uncontrolled vermin breeding facility:

https://gizmodo.com/a-billionaire-is-fueling-a-rat-explosion-in-a-chicago-park-in-the-stupidest-way-possible-2000823641

Whether or not the people who live, work and play in Lincoln Park want to be swarmed by rats and slip in thick slicks of pigeon shit is irrelevant. Seid can afford to pay any fine the city levies against him (a fine is a price, and he's a billionaire), which means there's no practical reason Seid has to ever stop. He has the freedom to operate unthwarted in his every desire, including his desire to carpet an entire neighborhood in feces, so everyone else lacks the freedom to live without pigeon shit and rats.

That's the thing about billionaires: as Peter Thiel wrote, democracy is incompatible with freedom (to be a billionaire). The fact that Barre Seid's desire to transform Lincoln Park into a pigeon-shit manure lagoon is wildly unpopular with Chicagoans is irrelevant. You can't vote Barre Seid out of office, because no one elected him Pigeon Shit Czar. He has assumed that office by right of conquest.

Our lives are full of horrible, extremely unpopular things that we can't vote away because billionaires like them. Take the decision to allow Larry Ellison and his failson to buy and kill Warner Studios. That's an incredibly unpopular idea, especially in California, where Warner, Paramount and the Ellisons are all based. Despite the fact that we all hate this idea, Ellison gets to do it, because he is unthwartable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/22/happy-chudmas/#baloney-in-our-slacks

Some of California's most powerful Democrats promised to stop the merger. Instead, they signed away California's future because they decided that they weren't powerful enough to thwart a billionaire:

https://prospect.org/2026/10/08/democrats-who-let-trumps-oligarchs-buy-hollywood-warner-bros-david-ellison-gavin-newsom/

The Warnermount disaster demonstrates the fundamental flaw in libertarianism. Even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can't open your copy of Atlas Shrugged anymore because the pages are all stuck together and you think the only role for the state is enforcing contracts, you still need the state to be able to enforce those contracts. If corporations or even individual billionaires amass more power than the state, then they can always tell the state's contract enforcers to fuck off.

The ref must be more powerful than the players on the field, so the smallest government you can have is determined by the size of the largest corporation and the wealth of the richest billionaire you're willing to tolerate.

The world is in really bad shape right now, but it doesn't have to be. As Mamdani has shown us, it's not that hard to run a well-administered, advanced technological civilization. Fixing potholes and making transit work and enforcing housing rules isn't rocket surgery. We know how to do those things – we just don't do them because billionaires don't want us to, and they are unthwartable:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-revolutionary-art-of-fixing-the

We let the most greedy, most ruthless people among us pursue their toddler's quest for an unthwarted life to the expense of any semblance of competent administration, and now we are fucked. That's why people are so angry about AI: there's nothing wrong with the idea of automating some tasks through advanced statistical techniques, but the reason so much of the world's scarce resources have been allocated to the AI buildout is that billionaires are infinitely horny for a technology that will let them sideline expertise in favor of money:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/#theory-free

After all, experts get to thwart billionaires. They can refuse to apply their expertise to a billionaire's folly. The kind of AI that the industry is pursuing today is predicated on the idea that you can just ask a computer to come up with "theory-free inferences" that will let it run a factory, drive a car, or perform medicine, without knowing anything, just by pulling statistical correlations out of unimaginably vast data-sets.

At some level, people get this. They understand that AI and billionaireism are intimately connected – that the reason the sector is on track to lose about a trillion dollars this year is that for billionaires, a trillion bucks is a small price to pay for an unthwartable life.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• McSWEENEY’S ISSUE 84 (ARTISAN’S TOOL ROLL) https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/mcsweeney-s-issue-84?taxon_id=3

• Trump’s Cascade of Canceled Corporate Enforcement Against Over 200 Corporations https://www.citizen.org/article/trump-cascade-canceled-enforcement-200-corporations/

• FEAR OF MUSIC (SUPER DELUXE EDITION) https://store.talkingheadsofficial.com/collections/fear-of-music

• The Monopoly on the Open Road https://prospect.org/2026/10/07/monopoly-on-the-open-road-patrick-industries-rv/

• Paramount Stock CRUSHED After Merger with Warner Discovery Closes https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/raises-for-me-layoffs-for-thee-the

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago National Inquirer shuts offices after anthrax delivery https://web.archive.org/web/20011221185744/https://www.etonline.com/celebrity/a6975.htm

#20yrsago Grey Goo melting online world Second Life https://web.archive.org/web/20061023190111/http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/08/grid-set-back-to-linden-login-only-some-goo-missed/
#20yrsago TiVo’s “self-destruct button” destructs https://web.archive.org/web/20061014132917/http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6650194.html

#20yrsago Disney exec: Piracy is just a business model https://www.netribution.co.uk/stories/cross-media/disney-co-chair-recognises-piracy-is-a-business-model

#20yrsago TSA confiscates geologist’s rock https://web.archive.org/web/20061019132853/https://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-thorson1005.artoct05,0,777555.column?coll=hc-headlines-oped

#20yrsago Handheld printer made from a toner cartridge https://spritesmods.com/?art=inker&page=4

#20yrsago Panicked chefs propose copyrighted food https://megnut.com/2006/10/10/keep-recipes-free/

#20yrsago Canadian music proposal would require DRM for online tunes https://web.archive.org/web/20061022201913/https://www.jeremydebeer.ca/content/view/95/2/

#20yrsago Iceweasel, a free-as-in-speech version of Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian–Mozilla_trademark_dispute

#15yrsago Pratchett’s Snuff: a rural/nautical tale of drawing-room gentility, racism, and justice https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/10/pratchetts-snuff-a-rural-nautical-tale-of-drawing-room-gentility-racism-and-justice/

#10yrsago Shade the Changing Girl: amazing, gorgeous new comic about aliens and mean girls https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/10/shade-the-changing-girl-amazing-gorgeous-new-comic-about-aliens-and-mean-girls/

#10yrsago Massive report details the surveillance powers of 12 Central and South American nations https://necessaryandproportionate.org/principles/

#10yrsago Scotland Yard charge: teaching people to use cryptography is an act of terrorism https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/cops-charge-cardiff-man-with-terrorist-crypto-training-offence/

#10yrsago RBS deliberately crushed more than 1,000 healthy UK businesses to seize and sell their assets https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/dash-for-cash?utm_term=.iq9ndLB5#.udNbypOJ

#10yrsago Though crime happens everywhere, predictive policing tools send cops to poor/black neighborhoods https://www.mic.com/articles/156286/crime-prediction-tool-pred-pol-only-amplifies-racially-biased-policing-study-shows

#10yrsago Bake: spooky chocolate chip cookies https://www.instructables.com/Creepy-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/

#5yrsago Dead letters https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

#1yrago A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah

#1yrago California bans algorithmic price-fixing https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/09/pricewars/#adam-smith-communist

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
  https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/

• Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
  https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow

• Paris: Slow Tech Summit, Oct 15
  https://slowtechsummit.com/

• Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01

• Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
  https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46

• Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
  https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai

• Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
  https://kilkenomics.com/

• Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
  https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

• Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
  https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation

• Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
  https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/

• Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
  https://montreal2027.ca/en

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
  https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8

• AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
  AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/

• AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

• How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc

• Could Tech Bosses Destroy Life As We Know It? (Politics JOE)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4VktU0SgY

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 537 (23966 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

When you’re a girl from Merseyside living in Indiana, one thing you’re going to do is get the 6AM Greyhound bus to Chicago to see EsDeeKid.

Since moving here ten months ago, the Scouse rapper has kept me tethered in some way to my home. With bars about Jürgen Klopp and “Scouse birds” ringing in my ears, I have roamed the aisles of Spirit Halloween as if it were the Louvre, and watched frat brothers throw up on street corners. If I squint my eyes and blur my vision, a Walmart can become a big Asda, the diner a Wetherspoons. I’ve watched the pink sunrise over cornfields and listened to “4 Raws” while contemplating whether Liverpool had a spell cast on it thousands of years ago, bestowing it with the special power to produce Scouse messiahs every millennium. The Beatles, now EsDeeKid. If you have ever been to Liverpool, you will understand that the average child on a BMX has more wit and confidence than any fully grown comedian with a Netflix special. It was only a matter of time before a Scouser took over the world, or at least the world according to Carti fans—compelling Italian teenagers, Timothée Chalamet, and people in the dusty corners of America to rap about evading the “plod.”

I step into the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago at 4PM, and see hordes of Gen Z kids in face paint and jester hats. A cold sweat hits me: ‘Have I drastically overlooked an essential part of EsDeeKid’s image? Have I been unwittingly associating myself with clowncore this whole time? Is this what getting old is like?’ Then, relieved, I realize I’m at the wrong venue. All these people are waiting to see The Garden. The next road over is where I’m meant to be, at the Aragon Ballroom, with emo girls wearing Union Jack beanies and boys with hair completely covering their faces queued up waiting outside.

Tonight, TikTok youth culture has claimed this neighborhood, snatching it away from the resident young professionals who watch from the booths of small-plate restaurants, a different micro core at every crosswalk running in front of Ubers and screeching with glee. 

I deleted TikTok off my phone before crossing TSA a year ago. I never redownloaded it, so the only short-form video content I’ve consumed since being in the U.S. is Instagram Reels: Gypsy Rose Blanchard fancams, Russian farmers, the man who says “separate checks please,” things like that.

Because of this, it’s difficult to know what the American EsDeeKid fan club will look like. His debut mixtape Rebel has hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify, but would it translate to the teens of this godless country? And if it did, would they really love him for his Scouse swag, or just because he went white boy crazy with Timothée?

I tapped into the spirits of my Liverpudlian ancestors and approached the youth to find out. 

Ellie, 23

VICE: What are your thoughts on the United Kingdom?
Ellie: I love Princess Diana, and I miss her every day, but right now I think EsDee is the UK princess. 

What does EsdeeKid mean to you?
Being from a place where a lot of rappers grow up and rap about their hardships, it’s really cool seeing it come from a different culture and get so big here. 

What do you think a council house is?
That’s where the kings go, where the leaders of your group all hang out, and you have a lot of money, and you smoke a lot of dope. Only good vibes there. And EsDeeKid is always there because he runs it. 

Lucas, 18

What do you think about the UK?
Lucas: I’m so sorry about the Queen, bro. 

What does EsDeeKid mean to you?
He’s the only rapper from Britland, which is cool. No one else in the history of rap ever came from Britland. 

What’s a council house?
A bunch of rats, a bunch of wizards, a bunch of medieval shit. 

The vast majority of fans I speak to do not know what a council house is, despite the tour being named Council House Rat Tour. Instead, EsDee’s recent mythical imagery, pairing Arc’teryx with chainmail, has given many the impression that the council estate is some kind of sacred place—a central meeting point for a community of freaks, lords, and the mischievous. A type of UK Skyrim tavern where you make beats.

This aesthetic framing of the council estate is something I wish I had tapped into when I was younger; how much better life could’ve been for those born in 1998 if we’d had our own EsDeeKid to unite the subcultures. I thought about my past emo self, the emos I knew, and the emos that came before me, who all hung outside Liverpool Courts, wore “Free Hugs” T-shirts, and had ears stained blue from Directions hair dye bought at Quiggins (RIP). I got a meatball Subway sandwich thrown in my face once for being a mosher, dip-dying the ends of my scraggly bleach job marinara orange. I know a Scouse figure like EsDee would’ve helped me come to terms with that more than a CAMHS counselor ever could. 

Liz, 22

What’s your favorite EsdeeKid Lyric?
Liz: “Outfit change on the day / I’m a genius.”

What does EsdeeKid mean to you?
He’s the essence of cool but calm. Elusive. 

Have you learnt any Scouse words from listening to EsDeeKid?
“Bird.” I love calling the ladies birds.

Maya, 17

What’s your favorite EsdeeKid Lyric?
Maya: “I’m the male version of ecstasy.” I think that’s really cute. 

What does EsdeeKid mean to you?
He’s someone to look up to. 

I stand between two speakers at the front of the stage and feel like I am in a lucid dream, hundreds of Chicagoans screaming “I’m a scumbag / I was raised in Liverpool slums, lad” behind me. EsDee shouting “‘ow’s it goin’ she-car-goooo” on top of a council house stage set, lifting his head in an MF DOOM-esque mask.

Just like it doesn’t matter that most of the people here do not know what a council house is, it doesn’t matter that I haven’t brought earbuds, and only have a £20 digicam which, earlier that day, a man had told me was “redundant media.”

The vibe EsDee conjures would work even in a Lutheran church service with the big light on.

He makes his way down the house and onto the stage, where he is joined by collaborator Rico Ace. At this point I retreat to the upper floor and watch an entourage of people in high-vis vests storm the pit with flashlights. But EsDee doesn’t stop to see if anyone needs medical help or water, because on closer inspection, they aren’t real security; they are teenage boys doing pit management, spinning their friends around like carnies at the Blackpool teacups, heightening the chaos everyone wants tonight. A real security guard standing next to me slowly shakes his head, hitting send on a text that reads simply “fuck this.” 

Shahir, 18, Omar, 20, Ryan, 19

What’s your favorite EsDeeKid lyric?
“Got girls flocking all over ‘cause I’m young, lit, and I’m handsome.” I just relate to that. 

What does “divvy” mean?
A weapon.

What’s a council house?
I don’t know.

Sierra, 27

What’s your favorite EsdeeKid Lyric?
Sierra: “Too much snow, kid coming like Canada / Got kush smoke all in me lungs, I’m running from plod, but I’m lacking the stamina / I’m whipping it smart, the NOS in me head got me gone, I can’t fuck with the canister.”

What does EsdeeKid mean to you?
He’s a super hot, young, talented Scouse prodigy. 

You wake up and you are blindfolded and put into a car, and you find out your parents have sold you to Fakemink. Are you happy or sad?
That would be awesome. I would rap with him in the car to wherever we’re going. 

Do you have a favorite Scouse word?
Wool. 

I smoke my first cigarette in four hours outside a bar selling $17 pumpkin spice espresso martinis and start crying. A large group of Americans has just walked past me doing Scouse accents, and the mixture of Modelo and amazement has turned my blood into a sentimental potion. It’s not that lyrics like “got your bird in a crop top / smoking top crop” make me emotional necessarily, but a figure like EsDeeKid is evidence you can do anything. You can go to Paris Fashion Week and then back home to a terraced house in Liverpool, and people think that’s cool as fuck, even Americans in Balenciaga. 

Our evening of EsDeeKid fandom data collection was confirmation that his work has the stamina to make it across the Atlantic, an important litmus test to see if a Brit will become a global superstar or be locked up in the Love of Huns Khia Asylum. Maybe in a few years, instead of Americans asking you to say “bottle of water” or “it’s Tuesday innit,” they’ll be asking you to say “chicken and a can of Coke,” and instead of asking if you know Paul McCartney, they’ll ask if you know EsDeeKid. Maybe the Timothée Chalamet conspiracy theorists were onto something, and we really are in the presence of a Scouse Paul Atreides.

Follow Charlotte on Instagram @lottelandrum

The post These Americans Love EsDeeKid. But Do They Really ‘Get’ Him? appeared first on VICE.

Here is a short update on the so-called Broadview Six case — one of the high-profile prosecutorial abuse cases coming out of ICE/CBP Midway Blitz occupation of Chicago in the fall and winter of 2025-26. To catch everyone back up, this was a case involving four candidates or elected officials, one campaign staffer and one activist. It was tied to ongoing protests outside the ICE Broadview facility outside Chicago. Federal prosecutors took a situation that involved protestors briefly making contact with a vehicle unexpectedly trying to drive through a protest line and jacked it up to a felony case. As one of the lawyers on the case told me at the time, the facts supported at best a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, and even that would been a wild overreaction to what actually happened.

Throughout the case, it was clear that the case was part of the Trump administration’s larger strategy of targeting peaceful protestors with wildly excessive charges. Eventually the case fell apart when major prosecutorial misconduct was uncovered on the part of the prosecutors in the case. All charges were eventually dropped in May with prejudice, just before the trial was to take place. The remaining mystery was tied to the original prosecutor in the case, who committed the misconduct securing the indictment the previous fall. (There was other misconduct tied to turning off doctored transcripts of that grand jury session.) That prosecutor, Sheri Mecklenburg, had a generally apolitical reputation and certainly was no right-winger. Defense attorneys had the impression she didn’t have a lot of confidence in the government’s position. She left the case with little explanation for a DOJ assignment working on the Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) in February. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois — Andrew Boutros — and Mecklenburg’s replacement — William Hogan — were both known to be strongly onboard with the Trump/ICE program. (Hogan also had a tattered reputation on the professional ethics front.)

‘We Are Not For Sale’

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson officially kicked off his reelection campaign last Sunday for the Feb. 23, 2027 mayoral election where he will face a crowded field of challengers. At least 14 people have announced their intention to run for mayor of the Windy City, though that number is expected to drop once nominating petition filing deadlines pass in late October.

I’m talking to you about the Chicago mayoral race because, in one of his most sweeping actions he’s taken since launching his reelection bid, Johnson today announced a city-wide temporary moratorium on data center development and expansion in Chicago for 12 months. The move is backed by a handful of city alderpersons, and the ordinance will block any new construction or expansion while the city of Chicago focuses on developing a “comprehensive regulatory framework for data centers,” a press release announcing Johnson’s ordinance said.

Johnson is selling it as a temporary pause that will give the city time to develop a strategy for how to allow local data center development that spurs economic growth, while not actively allowing for the kind of rampant construction that Americans across the political spectrum now vehemently oppose. Community resistance to these new facilities has reached a fever pitch as we enter the final stretch of the midterms campaign cycle. A growing mountain of evidence shows the infrastructure that houses cloud computing and artificial intelligence model testing is increasingly draining communities’ water supplies and contributing to rising electric costs.

“Chicago is open for business, but we are not for sale,” Johnson declared in a statement announcing his decision. “We welcome innovation, investment, and the jobs and opportunities that come with it, but growth must be done responsibly and in a way that protects the health, safety and quality of life of Chicago residents.”

Some of his opponents in the mayoral race argue the measure doesn’t go far enough, claiming the mayor is just buying himself time for his reelection bid. Others, like Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, have claimed that backlash to data centers is overblown and that a temporary ban on new construction ignores the fact that there are already 39 active data centers operating within city limits.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has already joined a handful of other state leaders that have overturned or temporarily paused new tax breaks for Big Tech companies looking to build new data centers in the state. Ohio is another place where Republican candidates are desperate to show voters they support some level of softening of the state’s decade-old tax incentives for data center construction.

Several other cities across Illinois have already placed a pause on new construction of the facilities as public backlash spreads. Chicago joins several major U.S. cities that have recently placed new restrictions on development while they try to sort out how to properly regulate new construction and to pass off any monetary or environment costs onto the major tech companies fueling the AI boom. (Americans are increasingly revolting against AI itself as whistleblowers warn of doomsday scenarios and artificial intelligence threatens jobs).

It’s a bipartisan issue that elected officials across the political spectrum are rushing to be on the right side of. Except President Trump, who has actively insulted Americans who are suspicious of the new projects and whose administration is actively trying to change federal policy that allows for community input at the onset of new data center construction.